Jonah must have let some of his emotion show through on his face, because Gary said, “Ah, you can’t tell me you actually wanted to go back and live out your life as that man’s son! He wouldn’t even hug you, remember?”
Jonah grimaced.
“You know I don’t, but—what happens when Lindbergh gets back to 1932 and I’m not there?” Jonah asked. “What if he takes revenge by talking a lot about time travel? What if he uses the Elucidator you gave him again and again and again? Or—the plane?”
“Kid, you are not very good at thinking like a criminal,” Hodge said, shaking his head. “Or like a liar.”
Jonah just looked at him.
“Charles Lindbergh’s never going to make it back to 1932,” Gary said. He slapped his knee as if he’d told a good joke. “Once he drops off all the kids we want him to take to the future, he’s not ever going to be able to return.”
“Genius,” Hodge said. With the hand that wasn’t holding Katherine, he kissed his fingers to his lips like someone complimenting an excellent meal.
“Who could have thought of such a thing?” Gary asked. “Oh, that’s right—us!”
He strutted around the cramped stairwell yet again.
“But—won’t that ruin 1932 if Charles Lindbergh never goes back?” Jonah asked.
Hodge shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “We’re going to be crazy-rich. Who cares if we mess up 1932? Maybe it will even help us!”
Jonah’s jaw dropped. The problem with dealing with liars like Gary and Hodge was that it was so hard to tell if anything they said was true.
He could believe that they cared about the money more than anything else.
“But . . . if it was such a big deal for me not to mess up 1932—such a big deal that you aren’t sending me to the future and making a lot of money from me—then wouldn’t it matter even more to have Charles Lindbergh vanish?” Jonah said. “I was just a little kid. He was famous! Nobody would have known anything about me if I hadn’t been his son!”
Both Gary and Hodge started howling with laughter. The baby Hodge held against his chest startled at the noise, punching at the blanket as if Katherine objected to their mockery.
“He—actually—believed—our—lies!” Gary gurgled, the words coming out between bursts of merriment. “It . . . wasn’t just . . . because I had the needle at his back. JB . . . must have told the same lie!”
“What are you talking about?” Jonah said. He didn’t understand, but he felt prickles of panic along his hairline anyhow. It was like his body knew that he needed to prepare for shocking news.
“Jonah, Jonah, Jonah,” Hodge said, shaking his head slowly and condescendingly yet again. “Can’t you figure it out? Why do you think we’d let you stand here in this stairwell while all the children of any value zoom on toward our glorious, wealthy future? You aren’t Charles Lindbergh’s son. You weren’t born to be anybody important at all. You’re nobody!”
THIRTY-THREE
Jonah stumbled backward, slamming against the wall.
“Nobody?” he repeated numbly. “But—but—I’m a famous missing kid from history! That’s why I was on that plane. The first time, I mean. That’s why you kidnapped me!”
It wasn’t that he’d wanted to be Charles Lindbergh’s son. It wasn’t that he’d ever wanted to claim any identity besides Jonah Skidmore. But he’d had months—and centuries—of getting used to the notion that he’d started out life as someone incredible, someone worth kidnapping. Maybe even worth kidnapping again and again.
It felt like a punch in the gut to hear Hodge say he wasn’t important.
Hodge was smirking.
“No, we kidnapped you because we could pass you off as Lindbergh’s son,” he said, shrugging. “It was too hard to get in to kidnap the boy himself. You look enough like him to fool his own father, and you were born the same year—your parents dropped you off at an orphanage in 1932 because they didn’t want you anymore, and we just picked you up before the orphanage opened its doors. You were going to die of malnutrition a few days later, so nobody cared.”
Nobody cared? Jonah thought. I was supposed to die as a toddler and nobody was going to care?
There was an echo to those thoughts, immediate answers: In this time period, Mom and Dad would have cared. Katherine would have cared.
He had such an ache in his throat now, because if Gary and Hodge really had won, then Mom and Dad would never get the chance to care about Jonah. If Gary and Hodge were telling the truth and Jonah wasn’t in the planeload of babies this time around—and the planeload of babies had just flown on to the future, anyway—then Jonah’s parents would never even meet him. And Jonah would just . . . well, what would happen to him now? If Gary and Hodge weren’t going to take him back to 1932, what were they planning to do with him?
And Katherine? Jonah wondered, because it was a little too terrifying to think about himself. What are they going to do with Katherine?
Gary and Hodge had given such specific instructions to Lindbergh, to have him age her up and then turn her back into a baby. It had definitely not been random. What could they still be planning?
Hadn’t they already ruined enough lives?
Jonah reached out and touched Katherine’s blanket-covered back, because even if she wasn’t the right age—even if he was scared to death about what might happen to either of them—it was still comforting to have her close by.
Hodge jerked the baby away from him. Jonah’s fingers barely brushed the blanket. He couldn’t even feel the ribbing of the pink-and-purple sweater that must still be wrapped about Katherine, beneath the blanket.
“You don’t look like you’re quite ready for the next revelation,” Hodge said. “Pace yourself, kid.”
“I don’t care who I am,” Jonah said, trying for a defiant tone. What he really wanted to say was, I don’t care about being anyone except Jonah Skidmore. But he wasn’t sure he could get those words past the lump in his throat. He tried a different approach, snarling, “Everything you’re doing can still be undone. There’s still time.”
Gary looked down at his watch Elucidator.
“Actually, we’re running out of time,” he said. “Maybe we should wrap this up, boss. Just in case.”
Hodge laughed merrily.
“No worries,” he told Gary. “Don’t you want to savor this next part?”
“I’d rather savor the riches waiting for me in the future,” Gary said, a giant smirk breaking over his face.
“JB and the rest of the time agency—they’re never going to let you collect all that money in the future,” Jonah said, turning his head side to side so he could address both men at once. “Maybe they’ll go easy on you if you turn yourself in. Maybe if you get Lindbergh to bring back all those babies on the plane right now, then—”
“You’re right,” Hodge said to Gary. “The boy has become tiresome. Let’s go.”
“Don’t forget,” Gary said, pointing to the baby cradled against Hodge’s chest.
Jonah lunged at Hodge, ready to rip baby Katherine out of his grasp. Because it suddenly seemed like the two men were planning to just head off into the future, leaving Jonah behind. Alone. He still didn’t understand what was going on—or why they weren’t worried about the time agents—but there was no way he was letting them get away with baby Katherine without him.
Hodge didn’t react the way Jonah expected. The man didn’t jerk the baby to the side out of Jonah’s reach. He didn’t command his Elucidator to take him and the baby away.
Instead Hodge dropped the baby into Jonah’s arms.
In his surprise Jonah almost let the baby slip on down to the floor.
“Katherine!” he cried, grabbing for the edge of the blanket, or for an arm or a leg he could get a firm grip on. He finally stopped the baby’s downward motion with one hand clenched around the baby’s right ankle and the other hand around her left wrist. The blanket snaked its way down to the floor.
&
nbsp; And then what Jonah saw almost made him drop the baby all over again.
Because there wasn’t a purple-and-pink-striped sweater under the blanket. There was a patched, threadbare sleeper, covering the scrawny form of a baby that Jonah recognized from old photos. But it wasn’t baby Katherine he was holding in his arms. It wasn’t even a baby girl.
It was the baby version of Jonah himself.
THIRTY-FOUR
“What? No!” Jonah moaned.
This was a time violation—a time abomination. Every second that ticked by with Jonah as a thirteen-year-old and Jonah as a baby occupying the same time period threatened to make all of time collapse forever. It wasn’t even possible for both of them to occupy the same time period—unless someone was deliberately trying to ruin time.
“How could you?” Jonah snarled at Gary and Hodge.
Jonah was still holding on to the baby by one wrist and one ankle, and just those two points of contact seemed to make Jonah guilty too. He eased the baby version of himself down to the floor and let go. He stepped as far to the other side of the stairwell as he could. But Hodge was blocking the door and Gary was blocking the stairs down—Jonah couldn’t get more than three feet away.
Gary and Hodge burst out laughing once again as Jonah pressed himself tightly against the wall.
“Finally the boy understands without us having to explain everything,” Hodge said to Gary.
“Yes, you do!” Jonah insisted. “But—explain after you undo this! Fix time before it collapses! Stop this! What’s wrong with the two of you?”
The two men just kept laughing. Jonah pointed a trembling finger at the baby on the floor.
“Send one of us away!” Jonah insisted. “Before time splits!”
He reached blindly for Hodge, as if there were any hope that Jonah could fix time himself by snatching the watch Elucidator from the man’s wrist or the camera Elucidator from his pocket or wherever he’d stashed it. Hodge easily shoved Jonah away. Jonah landed on the floor right beside his baby self.
“I guess he doesn’t understand,” Gary mocked. “Jonah, we did this on purpose! Splitting time is exactly what we wanted to happen!”
“This is your destiny! Your contribution to history!” Hodge said, waving his hands dramatically.
Jonah couldn’t let himself think about how much he was destroying, just by his very existence. His doubled existence.
“Then where’s Katherine?” he asked, shifting worries, because the entire fate of the universe and time itself was too overwhelming to think about. “What did you do with her?”
He craned his neck, as if he’d be able to see past Hodge and out the door.
Hodge’s smirk looked even more self-satisfied than ever.
“Ah, but that was the pure genius of our plan,” Hodge said. “We still get to benefit from selling thirty-six famous endangered children from history in the future. She replaced you on the plane!”
Jonah’s tortured brain tried to make sense of this. Hodge had walked out of the stairwell carrying baby Katherine wrapped in a purple-and-pink sweater. He’d guided Lindbergh onto the plane, the plane had taken off, and Hodge had returned carrying another baby wrapped in an ordinary baby blanket.
But Gary and Hodge said I wasn’t on the plane this time, Jonah thought.
No. They’d said he wasn’t going to be on the plane to the future with Lindbergh. They hadn’t said that he hadn’t been on the plane from the past. They’d split hairs answering him, just like they were trying to split time.
“But—but . . . Katherine’s not from history!” Jonah protested.
“The early twenty-first century is history, to us in the future,” Gary sneered. “Stupid!”
He kicked Jonah in the side, as if trying to make the insult hurt worse. Jonah guessed he should be grateful that Gary hadn’t kicked the baby.
“But Katherine’s not famous! Or endangered!” Jonah persisted.
Hodge crouched beside him, almost as if he were trying to show some sympathy.
“Sure she is,” he said. “Because of you, in both cases.”
Jonah could do nothing but stare blankly at him.
“Thanks to all her time travel with you, Katherine was solely or partly responsible for rescuing a dozen other endangered kids from history,” Hodge said. “She is famous in our time period for that. Most experts will argue that she played a much bigger role in saving kids and time than you ever did. But that will partly be because people are going to resent how you ended up.”
Dimly Jonah realized that Hodge was trying to get him to be jealous of Katherine.
“Wait a minute,” Jonah stopped him. “What do you mean, how I ended up?”
“This,” Hodge said, waving his hand to indicate Jonah sprawled on the floor right beside the baby version of himself. “The way you claimed JB’s rogue assistant, Second Chance, as your role model, and tried to destroy all of time forever by going back to the night of the time crash—and staying even after the baby version of yourself appeared. The way you would have destroyed all of time, if Gary and I hadn’t exiled you and this entire time period into a dead-end split.”
“Dead-end split” sounded like time-travel gobbledygook once again, but Jonah could make enough sense of it that it gave him chills.
“I’m not trying to destroy anything!” Jonah protested. “You’re making this happen!”
Hodge shook his head with fake sadness.
“That’s not how history is going to record this moment,” he said.
“But time travelers will see the truth!” Jonah said. “The time agency will come back and stop you! JB and Hadley—they’ll be here any minute!”
“So why aren’t they here already?” Gary taunted.
Jonah couldn’t answer that question.
“This time period is already shutting down,” Hodge said. “The first thing that goes is time travel into a period. Gary and me, we’ll still be able to get out for a little while longer.”
But not me? Jonah wondered.
He decided this wasn’t a good question to ask out loud.
“And then, eventually, your whole branch of time—kablooey,” Gary said, throwing his hands up in the air, acting out an explosion. “Total destruction. Game over.”
“And then there won’t be any future for you to make your billions in!” Jonah protested. “You’re destroying time for nothing!”
Hodge shook his head.
“This one really is a slow-brain,” he said. “I pity anyone who ever tried to educate him.”
Gary kicked Jonah again.
“Time’s splitting, remember?” Gary asked. “Thanks to you and baby you? We get our future, all right. Free and clear and trouble free.”
“Our future won’t have time agents,” Hodge clarified. “You might say we modeled it exactly on what’s best for us.”
“But, but—” Jonah sputtered.
“You should be thanking us for at least saving your sister,” Hodge said mockingly. “Because if we’d left her here, she would have died with everyone else.”
“That’s if this time period even exists long enough for her to be born,” Gary added.
A year from now, Jonah thought frantically. Katherine’s not supposed to be born for another year.
He was getting confused—if time didn’t last long enough for Katherine to be born, how could he have eleven years of memories with her? How could he have just carried her baby self from 1932 to now, before Gary and Hodge snatched her away?
He decided he didn’t have time to worry about any of that right now.
“This time period won’t last anywhere close to a year,” Hodge said, glancing at his watch. “I’d be surprised if there are more than a couple days left.”
“Maybe even just a couple hours,” Gary agreed.
Were they just trying to psych Jonah out? Make him give up?
“You can’t do this,” Jonah said desperately. “You can’t. It’s not fair. It’s not right.”
&nb
sp; Hodge leaned in close, almost as if he and Jonah were best buddies.
“We don’t actually have much choice,” Hodge said. “Once that plane crash-landed in this time period, this time was doomed. It’s always been doomed. You lived through thirteen years of it being doomed.”
“I tried telling the boy that,” Gary interrupted. “I don’t think he understood that, either.”
Jonah remembered what Gary had said: It was never possible for time to survive with you or any of the other babies from that plane living in this time period.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why you never saw tracers, growing up?” Hodge asked.
Not until twenty minutes ago, Jonah thought numbly.
He didn’t want the missing tracers to be important. But he knew they were. The only other time he’d seen tracers vanish completely from a time period was when Second Chance messed up everything in the 1600s.
When he was making time split.
Why didn’t JB or any of the other time agents notice this problem? Jonah wondered. Or—did they know, and they just didn’t want to upset us kids by telling us the truth?
“All the time agency’s frantic efforts—all your frantic efforts—those were like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Hodge said. “Though they did enable us to set up a backup safety plan. A second future to be gloriously wealthy in . . .”
“So what are we waiting for?” Gary asked.
“Nothing,” Hodge said. “Nothing else.”
“Good-bye, Jonah,” Gary said.
Were they leaving? Now?
Jonah lunged once again for Hodge, who was squatting down so close, right in front of him. If Jonah just grabbed Hodge and held on, then Jonah would go with them. It didn’t even matter where they were going. Jonah had to get out of this time period. How much time had passed with him and his baby self here together? Was it little enough that Jonah could still rescue his time period and thwart Gary and Hodge?
Jonah slammed hard into concrete. He’d fallen straight through the space where Hodge had been crouched.
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